Who ruled La Paz?

La Paz fills a deep canyon cut into the edge of the Bolivian Altiplano, the high plain of the central Andes, with the snow peak of Illimani rising to the south-east. The centre lies about 3,600 metres above sea level, which makes it the highest seat of national government in the world. The canyon offered shelter from the bitter winds of the plain above and a stream that carried gold. Spanish colonists founded the city as a waystation between the silver mines of Potosí and Lima, and over time it grew into the political capital of Bolivia and a centre of Aymara as well as Spanish-speaking culture.

The southern shores of Lake Titicaca, about 70 kilometres to the north-west, were one of the cradles of Andean civilisation. Between roughly 500 and 1000 CE the city of Tiwanaku dominated the region, with monumental stone temples and influence across the southern Andes. After its decline the Altiplano was divided among Aymara-speaking kingdoms such as the Pacajes and Lupacas. In the 15th century these were absorbed into the Inca Empire. The valley where La Paz now stands, known in Aymara as Chuqi Yapu, was a farming settlement whose streams were worked for gold.

After the Spanish conquest the conquerors fought among themselves. When the royal envoy Pedro de la Gasca had defeated the rebel Gonzalo Pizarro, he sent Captain Alonso de Mendoza to found a town marking the return of order. On 20 October 1548 Mendoza founded Nuestra Señora de La Paz, "Our Lady of Peace", first at Laja on the Altiplano and within days in the sheltered valley below. The town was laid out in a grid around a main square, now the Plaza Murillo. Within the Viceroyalty of Peru it prospered as a market and stopping point on the road between Potosí and the Pacific, and as home to landowners whose haciendas relied on Indigenous labour.

In 1781, during the great Andean rebellions, the Aymara leader Túpac Katari besieged La Paz for months, and many of its people died of hunger before Spanish troops broke the siege. Katari was captured and executed. On 16 July 1809 creole leaders in La Paz led by Pedro Domingo Murillo rose against the colonial authorities, one of the first such revolts in Spanish South America. It was crushed, and Murillo was hanged in the main square in January 1810, but the struggle continued until the Spanish American wars of independence ended Spanish rule. Bolivia, named after Simón Bolívar, became independent in 1825.

The constitutional capital was Sucre, the centre of the silver economy. As silver declined and tin mining rose in the late 19th century, power shifted towards La Paz, and after a civil war in 1898 and 1899 the presidency and the legislature settled there, while Sucre kept the supreme court and the title of capital. Railways linked the city to the Pacific coast. In April 1952 fighting in the streets of La Paz brought the National Revolutionary Movement to power, which nationalised the tin mines, introduced universal suffrage and carried out land reform.

Migrants from the countryside then filled the slopes and the plain above the canyon, where El Alto grew from a suburb into a separate and now larger city. In 2003 protests centred there over gas exports forced the president to resign. In 2014 La Paz and El Alto were linked by a cable car network, since grown into one of the largest urban systems of its kind. La Paz itself has about 750,000 people, and the combined urban area with El Alto more than two million, making it the political and administrative centre of Bolivia.